Edit 30 July 2013: Thank you to Paul Murrell, who wrote to tell me that you can do the same thing with vector images rather than raster using the grImport package and its function grid.symbols(). The advantage of vector images is that they don’t get pixellated and grainy as you zoom in on them.

5 responses to “Easy pictograms using R”

Hi Robert, I like your R pictograms ! I thought about doing something like this a while ago, but never got around it, well done to you that you did. I’m off on holiday for a week today but when I get back I’ll have a look and see if I can contribute anything. Best wishes. Andy

This is an area where Tufte and Spiegelharter appear to take diverging directions. Communicating risk is tricky and when dealing with a low numeracy audience I think they are justifiable. For one thing pictograms make it easy to visualize denominators and in that sense they are consistent with Tufte’s idea of rapid visual assessment.